AFTER YEAR OF MOSTLY DOWNS, MAN SEES $5.8 MILLION JACKPOT UP IN AIR

LYN BIXBY; Courant Staff WriterTHE HARTFORD COURANT

Since he turned 18 in 1991, Clarence D. Jackson has been one of the state lottery's steadiest customers.

Even before he came of legal age, his father would buy Lotto tickets for him. Since then, Jackson usually has bought three tickets for each drawing, sometimes seven -- his lucky number -- if the jackpots were big.

Frequently he would give tickets to his 64-year-old father, who has emphysema and depends on a machine that pumps oxygen into his nose through two clear plastic tubes that snake across the floors of the family's Hamden home.

Jackson, who is 23, did not have his mind on lottery tickets during the past year. He was looking after his father, who was in and out of hospitals and nearly died. His mother was also hospitalized. And the family cleaning business, which Jackson took over from his father when he was 17, was not doing well.

If Jackson had been paying closer attention to the Lotto game, he would have won $5.8 million.

Instead, last month he achieved worldwide distinction for losing out on the biggest lottery prize ever to expire.

Jackson said he did not discover he was a winner until 15 minutes before his ticket expired. It was 11:45 on a Sunday night, and he said he knew nobody would be answering the phones at state lottery headquarters in Newington.

Three days later, state officials rejected his claim for the money.

Television news crews besieged Jackson and his family at their ranch- style house in a quiet neighborhood. He ducked the cameras and politely referred all telephone inquiries to his lawyer, fielding calls from reporters as far away as London and Sydney, Australia, who wanted to know how he felt.

"I'm disappointed," Jackson said this week in his first interview. "But I'm not mad at Ott."

He was talking about Otho R. "Ott" Brown, the president of the Connecticut Lottery Corp., who rejected his claim for the prize.

"Ott turned the lottery around," Jackson said. "He's a nice person. I kind of think that deep down he wants to see me get it."

Jackson is reserved and thoughtful. Though he dropped out of high school after 10th grade, he has six years of experience operating the Federal Cleaning Co., a supermarket cleaning business created by his father. He had to leave school to take over the company and support the family when his father became too weak to work.

Jackson thinks it would have made good business sense for Brown to give him the prize. He said it might have increased lottery sales. "He's supposed to be running a corporation," Jackson said. "To keep good customers you can bend the rules. This isn't a crime."

Since Brown rejected his claim, Jackson has been working with New Haven lawyer David J. Skolnick and professional lobbyist Carroll Hughes, who plan to ask the legislature to pass a special bill that would give their client his prize money.

"In the legislature," said Skolnick, "I think the issue will be fairness."

There is precedent for special consideration. In 1988 the Maryland legislature passed a bill to accommodate a $75,000 lottery winner, a woman who tried to claim her prize one day late.

Skolnick said that if Jackson loses in the legislature, Skolnick will take the case to court, where, he said, the paramount issue will be flaws in state lottery procedures. He said he will raise questions such as why the state lottery claim center does not have people answering phones around the clock.

Had Jackson been playing the Norwegian lottery, he would be a rich man.

In Norway, according to Bruce LaFleur, publisher of LaFleur's Lottery World magazine, more than 90 percent of lottery players have individual identification cards that they use to buy numbers. Winners do not have to present tickets, he said, because the money is automatically deposited into their bank accounts.

The system is becoming very popular in Europe, LaFleur said, and in the United States, officials in some states are considering adopting it.

In an average year in Connecticut, according to Brown, between $6 million and $7 million in lottery prize money goes unclaimed.

LaFleur was asked whether he was aware of any situation in the history of lotteries that was similar to Jackson's in terms of money. "There is nothing close to it," he said.

$12 in his pocket

Clarence Jackson's father, also named Clarence, began his working life picking cotton in Georgia. He heard about opportunities for manufacturing jobs in Connecticut and headed north in the mid-1960s with $12 in his pocket.

He quickly found work at a Pratt & Whitney plant in North Haven and took a second, part-time job at night, cleaning stores. He made good money at Pratt, according to his son, but he saw that the cleaning business could be lucrative, and he started the Federal Cleaning Co.

In 1979, the family bought the sprawling house where they still live near the Hamden-New Haven line.

Jackson said he worked part time in the cleaning business when he was going to school, leaving him little time for anything else. "I didn't have a childhood like other kids," he said. "That was probably good, because I might have got into trouble."

He said a number of his friends from junior high school are dead or in jail.

"My parents are my best friends," he said. "I would spend more time with them than with the other kids."

It is evident from talking to Jackson that he has a special relationship with his father, whom he describes as a strong, generous man who opened the family home to relatives when they encountered trouble.

Lately, Jackson said the family that he supports through Federal Cleaning includes him, his father and mother, three cousins from California, his sister and her four children.

He said the cleaning business has been in decline ever since the recession brought on by the real estate collapse of the late 1980s. Since then, he said, many stores have created their own in-house cleaning crews.

But, he said, every week he would set aside some money to play the lottery, usually buying his tickets at the Snack Plus store in Hamden.

In 1991, the year after he took over the cleaning business, he hit five numbers in Lotto, worth $3,000.

His father's emphysema became worse over the years and grew very serious last fall. During the past year, he was in and out of hospitals and convalescent homes. Last spring, Jackson said, his father was so close to death that doctors did not expect him to survive.

He was first hospitalized Oct. 18, 1995, and he was most recently discharged last month, on Oct. 2.

The fateful Lotto drawing was Friday, Oct. 13, 1995.

At that time, Jackson and his father were distracted by his health.

One year later, when the ticket expired, they were still not paying attention.

"Man," Jackson reflected, "if we ever needed some money, we needed it that year."

In a dresser drawer

Jackson said he did not realize he had a winning ticket until last month, late on the night of Oct. 13, a Sunday.

As he left for work at 7 p.m., he said, his sister told him she had heard a news broadcast saying that a $5.8 million jackpot was about to expire. She said she would look through their tickets.

He was at work with his crew, preparing a supermarket for a grand opening the next day, when his sister contacted him by beeper.

He called home. "She said, `Clarence, I think we have the winning Lotto numbers,' " Jackson recalled. "She wasn't sure. She only remembered some of the numbers."

He said she found the ticket in a dresser drawer where his father's wallet and other belongings had been put after his recent return home from the hospital.

Jackson headed home, found an old printout of winning numbers from October 1995 and confirmed he had the winner. At that time, he said, it was about 11:45 p.m.: "I was thinking, `It's Sunday night.' I knew Newington was closed."

The next day was Columbus Day, a holiday. Jackson heard television news reports saying the $5.8 million prize had expired unclaimed.

"I was depressed," he recalled. "I couldn't do anything. The next day it was the same way."

Then on Wednesday he saw a newspaper story identifying the store where the ticket had been purchased. It was Snack Plus. He said he drove to the store, where he found Smiley, the clerk who usually sold him tickets.

"Smiley told me what to do. He gave me hope," Jackson said. "He said to find a good lawyer and put the ticket in a safe deposit box."

A friend who knew Skolnick told Jackson about him. Jackson went to Skolnick's office, and that afternoon the two of them drove to Newington to try to claim the prize. They were told it was too late.

A week later Skolnick and Hughes, the lobbyist, appealed directly to Brown in a one-hour meeting. "Our basic position is we have to abide by the rules," Brown said afterward. "I don't have the authority to change those rules."

Lottery prizes have expiration dates primarily for accounting purposes, so the liability can be written off when the money is not claimed within the time limit.

Many states have a one-year claim period, but others, like Maryland, limit the time frame to six months.

In 1988, when the Maryland legislature voted to accommodate the woman who tried to claim a $75,000 prize one day late, it retroactively changed the deadline for filing claims from 180 to 182 days.